A Tea Dance at Savoy, by Robert Meadley

A wallow in the sump of the popular psyche

At the end of the 1970s, among innovative fictions by the likes of JG Ballard, the literary journal New Worlds included a handful of mysterious, highly accomplished pieces by one RG Meadley. Some were short stories; others illustrative collages, oddly captioned, like Victorian broadsheets issued from some parallel universe. As far as the literary arts were concerned, RG Meadley might then have vanished into such a universe, so this first volume of his writing is not so much long awaited as a total surprise.

Such a book, we might have hoped, would collect his early work. Nothing so straightforward. Gorgeously designed, lavishly illustrated, A Tea Dance at Savoy is a collection – but of what? Gonzo journalism? Hallucinatory rhapsody? m? A "stew", its author calls it, and so it is: a paranoiac-critical gallimaufry.

A recurring theme is the achievement of his publisher, Savoy. Under the aegis of its enigmatic patron, Robert Holland, the self-proclaimed "Most Banned Publishing Company in Britain" has since 1976 fought the legal system tooth and nail for the right of art to confront, disturb and destabilise. Having served two prison sentences for obscenity, Savoy's publisher and principal author David Britton told Index on Censorship that establishing incarceration as the price of publication might help to stem the ever-swelling flux of unnecessary novels.

Britton's most notorious title, the brilliantly vile Lord Horror, became the first book to be banned in Britain since Last Exit to Brooklyn. Defended in 1992 by Geoffrey Robertson QC, Britton's Meng & Ecker comics still languish under prohibition. Their illustrator Kris Guidio describes Britton as a Mancunian Lautréamont. Fair enough: but since Meadley decides to approach Lord Horror via Flanders and Passchendaele ("In Dave's universe, monstrosity is the only alternative to meanness"), a more comparable French blasphemist might be the Marquis de Sade.

"There are still nightmares to negotiate," says Meadley. He wants to talk about Dachau. He wants to talk about Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. It says much for the scope of this collection that a measure of light relief is provided by the title chapter, an utterly compelling reading of the funeral of Princess Diana as a primitive ritual of blood and love: "an eerie suburban Woodstock".

Undismayed by his compulsion to truffle through the sump of the popular psyche, Meadley comes on like a situationist WG Sebald. "It could have been cars or shoes or orchids," he avers, quite unconvincingly, "or ballroom dancing or cosmetic surgery or colour co-ordinated bedrooms. It happens to be understanding." However bizarre his ideas, he sees them perpetually overwhelmed "with some new absurdity".

In the inevitable chapter on Osama bin Laden ("The Old Man of the Mountains"), he relates the attacks on New York and the Pentagon not only to Harry Potter but also The Lord of the Rings. "The yin and yang of humour are comfort and unease," he says. "Unease is crucial."

The reviewer's new novel is 'Finding Helen' (Black Swan)